Cottage-hopping

Hello all—Marshall Klimasewiski typing here.  I can’t thank the LBC members enough for reading my novel and for all this kind attention—especially C. Max Magee for nominated the book and speaking about it in such a flattering way.  As the book review sections shrink and close and the smaller presses where the most innovative fiction is being published often get left behind, or larger publishers float out a novel like mine more or less naked, reserving their marketing and publicity budgets for safer bets, outlets like this do seem ever more valuable and vital.  I’d found that deteriorating situation frustrating as a reader long before I ever worried about it as a writer:  where do you find the sorts of books you’re looking for, from authors whose names you don’t know yet, when you recognize that you’re not going to see them in the Times?  My impression is that there are better answer to that every year, and anyone who thinks blogging is mostly about bitching and tearing things down hasn’t been visiting sites like this.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with a little eloquent bitching, of course.)

I love the bad vacation stories.  I actually don’t think I’ve ever had a really painful one myself—my moments of deepest angst and humiliation seem to find me at home—and the couple of extended trips to Sooke (where the book is set) that my wife and I were lucky enough to make were blissful and deeply undramatic—free of meddling friends, murders, and voyeurs (as far as we knew).  But we just had our first child a year ago, and being somewhat older, cowardly parents, we haven’t ventured out with him too much quite yet.  So I’m guessing I may have my most challenging vacations ahead of me.

But in honor of Cyrus, I can offer a story from the other side of the vacation.  As I was telling Ed the other day, I grew up a “local” on a small lake in a town in northwest Connecticut where a lot of New Yorkers had second homes—little, dumpy cottages under pine trees with single-section docks and fancy ski-boats tied to the docks all summer.  Part of my initial attraction to Sooke had to do with its resemblance (despite many opposite-coast differences) to my hometown.  When I had my first leave as a teacher, my wife and I had meant to stay in Victoria, holing up and writing with a pretty view out the window and our lives at a distance for a couple of months.  But when we found we couldn’t afford Victoria someone there recommended this fishing town about an hour up the coast—less pretty and prepped for visitors, a lot quieter, a little neglected and resentful, maybe, but in a way that I found endearing and familiar.  My town in Connecticut was not far from the “villages” like Litchfield with their central greens surrounded by white-steeple churches and founding family homes that sported their eighteenth or seventeenth century origins on little plaques by the door printed in a forefather’s font.  But our lake was a bit shabby, with an algae problem and a lack of zoning, and just behind the waterfront properties were small, struggling farms and people selling firewood.  Right on the lake, though, most of the houses were second homes, so the town was abandoned and either creepy or peaceful, depending on your temperament, between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

At some point in our teens it suddenly occurred to a friend of mine and I that all these closed-up cottages were available to us, and also that we might have a need for a second-home ourselves.  True to the nature of the town (and maybe the early 80s in such a place), if the cottage owners had even bothered to lock the front door they’d surely have left a window unlatched.  So we started sampling the cottages after school and before our parents got home.  We were timid kids—not at all like Cyrus—so we didn’t drink or smoke or perpetrate any of the proper high school indiscretions (girls? are you kidding?).  But there was something weirdly thrilling about stepping uninvited and uninhibited into someone else’s house and life.  As cottages, too long closed-up, these places were full of strange, intimate smells, and even if they were fairly emptied out—we found less of interest in drawers than we’d expected—what they lacked set them apart from our homes and made them feel easier to adopt, glorified tree-forts.  For instance, they usually lacked a television, but there would always be a radio (the first generation of plastic bedside alarm clocks—big and white, with a green-glowing circular dial of frequencies), and while we more often changed it to our stations, sometimes we’d get a kick out of leaving it on whatever the owners had been listening to:  exotic things I’d never heard, like NPR.  If the gas was still hooked up we’d make do with the scraps of imperishables they’d left behind:  brew ourselves some instant coffee and mix a packet of oatmeal.  When we got more accustomed we were stupid enough to lay fires in the fireplaces (this was into the fall and the cottages were chilly).  The fact that the smoke out the chimney never got us into trouble speaks to just how abandoned the neighborhood was, I guess.  And there were bits of treasure to discover, too:  letters sometimes (never as interested as you wished—too full of unexplained history), a terrific stash of Mad Magazines in the bedroom of a kid a couple of inaccessible years older than us, and better still, a Playboy tucked between the towels in a linen closet.  Sitting on the shabby couch before the fire, with a cup of Sanka and the radio playing jazz, flipping through the sweet-smelling, glossy pages of luxuriant flesh, I imagined I was sampling what my evenings would be like in a few years, on the far side of college, living on my own.

One day we heard a car pull into the rutted, pine-needle-covered driveway while we were in the cottage with the Mad Magazine stash.  We crept to the front of the house and there they were—the Mad-aficionado's parents, stepping out of their Volvo.  This shouldn’t have surprised us, and it probably should have happened sooner:  a lot of the “summer people” (as we called them) came up for an odd weekend in the off-season now and then, especially when the weather was supposed to be nice or the foliage was at its best, and this was a Friday afternoon.  Sneaking out was actually easy—we went through a window at the back of the house as we heard them unlocking the door—but we didn’t have time to clean up after ourselves.  We speculated a lot about what they’d think when they found our couch tableau:  the dirty dishes and afghans pulled from the closets and magazines strewn across the coffee table.  The ashes in the fireplace (we hadn’t laid a fire that day).  But we didn’t really feel like Goldilocks so much as the bears, our home invaded.

That didn’t end our visits, although the cottagers’ story got around town (as everything did) and we resolved to quit.  The temptation was too strong some days, when something about home and my brother and sister waiting for me there felt too dreary.  But that spring, or maybe it was the next fall, a cottage burned to the ground, and when it was determined that a kid we vaguely knew—a few years younger than us—had set the fire, we did quit.  But it’s always felt in an odd way like the first real travel I did:  not being taken someplace by parents but venturing out, exploring, getting the feel of a different sort of life.  And when the New Yorkers who owned those cottages were back in town, they looked different to me, now, too:  more alluring, really, though less mysterious.

Comments

[Max]

Welcome Marshall, and thanks for your interesting post. I suppose it makes sense that you've experienced both sides of the tourist/townie dynamic since you portray both so well in The Cottagers.

I hadn't realized, though, that Sooke is a real place. Did you get any feedback from real-life Sookers (Sookians?) about your inventing some odd and creepy characters in their midst?

[Marshall]

Hello Max--and thanks again! No, you know, I haven't heard a thing from the Sookes, and to the best of my knowledge, the book wasn't ever mentioned in the Vancouver or Victoria papers. I presume this is a case of no-news-means-bad-news, but at least they were kind enough not to pan it. I worried a lot about offending, since Sooke and East Sooke (and East Sooke Park) are all real places. And places that have become very dear to me. I did a lot of low-level "research"--spoke to friends we'd made there, read up in the Sooke Region Museum, poked into the corners of town (especially on our second visit, when the book was further along)--in an effort to be as accurate as possible. But of course there wasn't a Cyrus or a Constable Collingwood there, and I had to mostly transplant my sense of the townies from my own townie past, far from Sooke. So I can understand how it might have looked like I was taking a dig at the locals, though that was the last thing I wanted to do. And I'm sure I got things wrong. In my limited experience, the book creates its own needs so quickly and comprehensively that unless it's a priority (as it wasn't, for me), an external concern like fidelity to the character of a community gets left behind. Or the fidelity quickly shifts to the created community. I'm sure there are two Sookes, and mine only exists between those covers. Theirs is a better place in almost every way, no doubt.

[Garth]

From Marshall's post, I learned where he must have formed the sense-memories necessary to realize East Sooke on the page...a continent away, in Connecticut. One of the real achievements of the book, I thought, was precisely it's ability to "take a dig" at the locals the way one takes a dig at one's siblings, rather than the way one digs at one's inferiors. Put another way, East Sooke is not just a place, but a psychology. Which is why it's important that Cyrus, an admittedly abnormal exemplar of Sooke syndrome, be granted what Grace Paley calls "the open road of destiny." And the further away I get from the book, the more Cyrus stays with me.

My favorite American writers of the last century have been both insiders and outsiders, giving us a similar enjambment of place and person. I'm thinking Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Bellow's Chicago, Cheever's Connecticut, Deborah Eisenberg's Manhattan. This is not even to speak of the 19th Century Russians, for whom Russia was an obsession. If you'll grant the comparison, Steven King has more recently explored the way being an insider in a community outside the main thrust of global capital (Castle Rock) can stamp someone's life. August Wilson recently completed a 10-play examination of a few blocks in Pittsburgh.

But I have the feeling, with a lot of the contemporary fiction I'm reading--especially by writers of Marshall's generation or my own--that place is simply a peg on which one hangs one's plot (I'm reading, and enjoying, the book of Tao Lin's stories right now). Some buildings, some houses, a name, real or imagined. Is this the homogenization of space at work? A momentary ebb? Or something I'm just imagining?

[Bookdwarf]

One of the things I appreciated about The Cottagers was the local/cottager divide. It's not a good thing, I know, but you can't help but feel that sort of thing sometimes.

[Marshall]

You know who else I think is lately writing about place in just the way you describe, Garth, is Edward P. Jones. Have you been reading him? His under-appreciated first collection, Lost in the City, is an understated, quietly fierce refashioning of Dubliners, and the way he has extended the portrait of his D. C. in All Aunt Hagar's Children, including returning to various characters from the first book (usually revisiting them from oblique angles) I've found really poignant, unflinching, and expansive. And I find his development of such a book-bound community especially interesting because he's an author almost always writing about alienation. It seems like the essence of what fiction (alone?) can do.

Thanks again to all of you, by the way. You just can't imagine how cheering and--well, inspiring, frankly--it is to get all this feedback. This first book of mine and my first child "came out" in the same week last May, and I've realized ever since that the only thing that can come close to the satisfaction of having someone compliment your kid is having someone compliment your book.

[Garth Hallberg]

I was lucky enough to get a chance to review All Aunt Hagar's Children for The Millions, having reviewed The Known World some years back. Wyatt Mason, who I think is one of our best critics, wrote a much, much better review than mine in Harper's. Max and I, as quondam DC residents, have really appreciated Jones' multivalent use of setting. I especially liked "In the Blink of God's Eye," and the story about the old man with the jones (sorry) for "young stuff."

[Anne]

So much that's wonderful, here, Marshall, so thank you!!

I spent lots of time in Torrington in grad school, so I'm thinking about *that*--my best friend's mom had a condo up there and so we would crash on weekends.

But I am finding it hard to believe how right you got the PNW as an outsider--I want to write more about that.

Anyway, thank you for your book and for your time here this week!

[Marshall]

Torrington--sure. It was the big city for us, a 20-minute drive I must have made a thousand times: where my friends and I would go for the fast-food, the arcade, and the R-rated movies. It was also the downtown main street I personally lost (we all have at least one, I presume?)--where my mother once took us to buy our shoes or get our teeth cleaned and we'd have a nice Italian meal on my father's birthday (I thought they made superior Fetticini Alfredo at the age of 7), and then, over the course of a dozen years or so, it all closed up and the town bled into its edges. I wonder if it's come back at all?

And thanks very much for your kind words about my attempts to capture the Pacific NW--I'm glad it seemed convincing.

[mccrearysbeach]

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[Inversiones en petroleo]

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